“An internal Pentagon document obtained by CBC’s the fifth estate raises questions about the quality of the investigation conducted by coalition forces into an allegation that as many as 27 civilians were killed in Iraq by a Canadian airstrike.”
The Canadian military does not believe the allegations are valid: “The [Canadian Air Force] review identified that there were no substantive grounds to believe that civilians had been killed,” Canadian Armed Forces Public Affairs Officer Capt. Kirk Sullivan told the fifth estate in an email.”
However, the source was a member of the Kurdish Peshmerga, giving the allegation some credibility: “It wasn’t a question of some civilian or some individual off the street, for lack of a better description, saying, ‘I heard this,'” says Stuart Hendin, a Canadian lawyer who teaches international military law to governments and armed forces around the world. “When one of your allies is saying we have a report of this, it’s something that ought to be taken with much more than a grain of salt. It has to be taken a little bit seriously.”
Disturbingly, “internal Pentagon documents also reveal the Canadian military’s legal assessment about Canada’s duty to investigate the incident.
The U.S. authors of the document note “[Canadian Joint Operations Command Legal Advisor] opinion is that, under the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), there are no obligations for the [Canadian Air Force] to conduct an investigation.”
The CBC report provides a pdf of the Pentagon report on the strike. It also makes reference to a web site, The Airwars Project, that monitors coalition bombing missions in Iraq and Syria. here is the link to that site: http://airwars.org/index.html
IR Theory & Practice 